Do Love

‘Half Face’ by Finnegar

Don’t Do Hate
08 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: Caiaphas, the high priest, said: ‘It is necessary that one man should die to save all the people. …True! It was. He died to save us all.

Reading that today, 09 March 2007, it suddenly occurs to me that there is another interpretation of the death of Jesus the Christ in order to save us all, and it is this:

Christ showed us the way to eternal salvation by dying for love.

That’s my theory, very personal. That just occurred to me this afternoon, visiting at my daughter Teresa’s place at Baesa, Quezon City. Incidentally, I’m typing this at their desktop computer, the one I gave them a year or so ago complete with a printer and, a few weeks ago, resuscitated for them. It had died, literally; their Windows XP had crashed. It didn’t die for love – it died because of its own internal weakness. That inherent weakness of Windows is the reason NASA would have none of Windows in its software for any of the flights it fancies – Windows would be the first to crash.

Microsoft Windows is known to crash every now and then and the Baesa crash was not a surprise. I consider myself an expert when it comes to setting up Windows XP, but nobody’s perfect. At home, we have been using two desktop PCs (1 for the Hilarios and 1 for the office) side by side for over a year now, and I have been installing and reinstalling software in those two PCs since then countless times. Just the other day, I reinstalled Windows XP in the two PCs about 6 times – virus + Trojans + spyware, probably and errors on my part, certainly.

Why the talk about Windows in an item about love – has Windows any lesson to us about love? Yes, I do believe it has, and it is this:

Love what you have. Hate is such a waste of creative energy.

‘Kill Bill’ is such a waste of energy. A few days ago, I emailed someone who was ranting against Philippine politicians and leaders and blaming them for the ills of the country, and told him it was a pity to spend energy on anger when it can be channeled to something more productive, more creative. And he responded: ‘TAMA KA DYAN. (You’re correct there.) USELESS GETTING ANGRY.’

That’s why Jesus did love, and did not hate. He was instructing us how to live everyday: Do love, don’t do hate.

Ultimately, he was instructing us to live forever this way, let me say it again:

Christ showed us the way to eternal salvation by dying for love.

Now, in my view, there are 4 important things to consider in that formulation:

Showing the way. Jesus didn’t live for himself. He didn’t try to attain perfection for himself. He was unselfish. When he knew he was ready for his ministry, young as he was, he embarked on it boldly, not even informing his parents, Mary and Joseph, who were concerned. When you love, you love everyone equally and have no special attachment even to your parents. He was willing to die for his conviction; he was willing to sacrifice everything for his attachment, and he had only one – it was called Love. And it was enough: Love covers all, more than a multitude of sins.

Eternal salvation. Our ultimate goal is to possess eternal redemption, or eternal life, whichever comes first. There is no greater goal than this – there is no other goal in life than this.

Dying. To be saved, to be redeemed as sinners, we have to die. Ah, death, where is thy sting; grave, where is thy victory? In dying, we don’t have to breathe our last; we only have to die to self. That is to say, to renounce the self as private, complete, independent, free. The self is not whole; the self is only one member of mankind, which is The Whole. When you realize that, when you are able to accept that, you have died to self.

Loving. Love is physical, psychical, personal, emotional, chemical etc, but is not shared with only 1 or 20 or 300 or 4,000,000; it is shared with all – or it is not love. The way I see it, that is the true meaning of 1 Corinthians 13. Whom do we love? We are selective and should not be. Love is all-inclusive. Love is not between people who select each other – love is among all the people. Love selects all.

Now, the concept of ‘dying for love’ need not be physical – it is first of all psychical, involving the self: Love is a sacrifice of one’s self-interest in the interest of one’s love. That is why love is the most difficult thing we have to do.

The image by Finnegar illustrates what I mean: If you can die to self, if you can accept that you are not whole until you accept that you are part of the world, or that the world is part of you, then you can indeed die for love.